Every Night

Polyvinyl; 2004

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Indulging imprinted nostalgia is a tricky business. It's to the credit of Fred Thomas and his army of collaborators in Saturday Looks Good to Me that they so consistently connect with a weirdly instinctual recognition of the generalized 60s music from which their own music is drawn. For the most part, their audience's perception of that music is purely indexical, informed only by second-hand documents of the era. For the same reason, my parents would never spin Every Night or All Your Summer Songs when they could flip on an oldies station or mine their LP collection instead: SLGTM are catering to a perception of the 1960s that never actually existed; they channel their own experiences into decades they've never lived, and speak to an audience who can appreciate Phil Spector references, bombastic Pet Sounds percussion, garage organ, and the kind of tambourine that once grounded a rhythm rather than embellished it, but necessarily can't experience these components with the same kind of time-warp authenticity that the music exudes.

If SLGTM didn't recognize the fundamental conflict of recontextualizing a style of music for which most of their listeners have only an abstract historical context, their music would fall apart. The success of Every Night, much like All Your Summer Songs before it, is entirely dependent on its contemporary relevance in the guise of almost fetishistic devotion to 60s pop nostalgia. "Since You Stole My Heart", a mono-friendly girl-group love letter that smacks of the sickly sweetest trip down a boardwalk you've never been on, represents the far extreme of SLGTM's direct emulative powers. But gradually, a darker world of thrift stores, cheap cigarettes, and rum & Cokes pierces through the band's façade of straight-faced homage, hinting at something more compelling and contemporary beneath.

The divide between the band's affected 90s lo-fi feel and genuine 60s recording fidelity is a delicate one, and pushing too far to either side damages the band's inspired but fragile aesthetic. Summer Songs achieved this balance nearly flawlessly, but Every Night occasionally loses its footing. A few largely acoustic tracks (particularly the heavy and oddly polished "Dialtone" and "We Can't Work It Out") fail to adequately veil Thomas' narcissistic pretense as a lyricist. Where the pop-mysticism of "If You Ask"'s psych-lite production effectively hides the song's weighty lyrical undercurrent, the relatively hi-fi demo quality of "Dialtone" brings Thomas' brooding relationship with an ex-love to the forefront of the song, relegating the blithe piano and tambourine arrangement to mere set dressing. The resulting song feels overproduced and too distinctly current, and temporarily hinders the album's retro charm.

Many songs, however, achieve the same heights of Summer Songs; the reverb-drenched, Spector string-heavy "Until the World Stops Spinning", Nuggets outtake "Keep Walking", and effervescent sunshine vibe of penultimate "Lift Me Up" are frozen in an ambiguous moment that reasonably could have been culled from any point in time between 1960-1967, with just enough contemporary lyrical context and modern vocal affectation to connect the band's musical conceits to more current influences.

If the band's established sound wasn't such a direct homage, replication of a former release might be considered a major fault. However, SLGTM construct their songs from such a deceptively diverse palette that their reserve of material, though all vaguely familiar, is potentially endless. Their scope may be limited, but their wealth of source material is as broad as the subconscious vinyl fantasies of their audience.